In order to keep the momentum of a show, a great opening act has to go out every night and walk a tightrope, striking the fine balance between drawing the crowd’s interest and stoking their excitement for the guys coming on after them and blowing them out of the water and making them look bad. You see the same thing in organized fighting. Mixed martial arts, boxing, hell, even professional wrestling obeys this rule: ratchet up the tension gradually, notch by notch, until it’s ready to explode. It’s good stagecraft, and it’s good fun.
But once in a while, you run into a complete jerkface who won’t cooperate with the time-honored laws of dramatic tension. Somebody full of themselves, determined to show you up and show you out.
No matter what your plan was to blow em away and make a big splash, there’s always an utter bastard like Barack Obama out to make you look like a complete assclown by comparison.
Dear God. From now on whenever I hear the word “Jindal” in public, my pupils are gonna dilate and I’ll have a flashback like a ‘Nam veteran with PTSD. Unlike those guys, my visions will be of nervous laughter and acute boredom instead of blood, murder and mayhem, but still. Same difference, right?
In music, in competitive speechgiving, in life, there are times when we have tough acts to follow. Sometimes it’s life with a talented sibling, sometimes it’s topping something amazing we’ve done ourselves, but either way, the people who shine under this pressure are the ones who don’t bother one upping what came before them, but choose to move in a fresh direction.
John McLaughlin can probably empathize. When you’re a guitarist for Miles Davis, it tends to cast a shadow. When you’re coming off of Bitches Brew (which is honestly worth its own story), it’s like a black hole, sucking attention in and not letting it escape.
The music industry worked differently back then than it does now – a major record that’s released now has to be staggered to allow time for marketing, for touring, for an audience to build up on the radio, whatever. In the 60’s and 70’s, musicians released records more frequently. Devotion came out not long after Bitches Brew, and while it’s a decent showcase for him, you can sense that his sound and ideas hadn’t blown up yet. And maybe he felt the same way, because after Devotion came out, this already awesome guitarist holed up at home, practiced like a madman, and reemerged in 1971 with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and a debut record called The Inner Mounting Flame.
The group was based in New York, and all of them had different musical backgrounds. McLaughlin was on the Guitar, classical bassist Rick Laird held the strings, Billy Cobham played drums and other assorted percussive instruments, Jerry Goodman, another classically trained player in Rick Laird’s mold, played the violin, and the organ and keyboard were under Jan Hammer, who’d eventually get famous for… writing the Miami Vice theme.
…
Anyway. They all had different musical backgrounds, and that diversity came through in their work. But McLaughlin recruited them, composed the tracks and provided the overriding vision, and the Inner Mounting Flame can be thought of as the ultimate distillation of the themes that make McLaughlin a notable artist – classical jazz with elements of soaring, high tempo electric rock. This, ladies and gentlemen, was one of the first jazz fusion records:
To add to the inspirational flavor of the album, the back cover of the LP had the widely-acclaimed poem Aspiration by Sri Chinmoy, who was McLaughlin’s spiritual mentor. The Indian teacher is widely known for his teachings and philosophy on spirituality and inner peace. The poem on the back cover underlined the spiritual theme of the album.
Sony Music Entertainment released a re-mastered CD version of the record in 1998 complete with a new set of liner notes by none other than the great composer and producer Bob Belden. The cover was a facsimile reprint of the original LP cover and is full of pictures of the original members of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And you might recognize “You Know You Know”, it’s been sampled in songs by Mos Def (Kalifornia) and Massive Attack (One Love).
If McLaughlin wanted to make his own mark after working with folks like Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, he absolutely did it – The Inner Mounting Flame is firey and fast paced, taking a small bit of an earlier act and whitting down to its essential edge, and it might be proof that there isn’t any act too good to follow up on.
You know, unless you talk like a bit character from a Tina Fey show.